The Mess IS the Work: What I Learnt From Talking to 15 BA Professionals

1. The method
2. A few caveats
3. How to read this report
4. The insights
5. The narrative
6. Final thoughts

I conducted semi-structured interviews (45 — 60 mins) with each participant. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and quotes were analysed, themed, and insights were generated. Lastly, I validated that each insight could really be backed up based on the original transcripts, wrote a description, and this report.

The tools

• Interviews were conducted over Zoom and transcribed using Zoom AI (except for one where I forgot to turn it on and had to transcribe by hand omg).
• Analysis and theming was done in Miro.
• I refined this report using Claude.
• Colleagues and friends' brains were used to proofread and challenge my thinking throughout.

This is qualitative research which is about patterns across conversations, not statistics. No single insight comes from a single conversation; they represent threads that emerged across multiple interviews. If you've done research like this before, you'll know that themes tend to start surfacing at around five — eight interviews. By fifteen, I was hearing the same patterns again and again. That consistency is itself a finding.

Most business analysis professionals I spoke to were based in the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, so this is firmly a westernised, anglophone perspective of the profession. The BA profession in these countries shares a lot — the same certs, similar culture, same professional bodies, the same LinkedIn (arguments). But business analysis professionals working in fundamentally different organisational cultures aren't represented here, and the findings should be read as anglophone, not necessarily universal.

In addition, every participant volunteered after hearing about the project, mostly through my LinkedIn network. And if you know my writing, you know I have opinions. Which means my network probably skews toward a certain type of BA, the kind that is slightly less traditional, more get-shit-done, and more experienced.

But it does mean you should read this as here's what fifteen business analysis professionals told me rather than here's what all BAs think.

Or take this as a challenge to do your own research — I'd love to read your findings if you do.

There is one section per insight. Each insight has a short description and a selection of quotes from the conversations. Where relevant, I've linked the insights (many are closely related!)

Three insights stood out as key. These were insights that were highly established based on what people said, and were (in my opinion) the most interesting things I uncovered from this work.

Four insights are marked as supporting. These are well grounded in the research but less impactful or interesting. They establish logical foundations for the other insights. The remaining ten insights form the bulk of this report. These are not as oh dammmnnnnn as the key insights, but are important parts of the whole narrative I heard.

But that's enough faffing around, no? Let's get stuck into the insights ...

1. The idea of a "proper BA" is a myth (key insight)
2. No, you're not imagining it — the role really is that misunderstood
3. Almost no one 'chose' the role … it chose them (supporting insight)
4. The BA role has got smaller, dumber, and more specialised
5. Seniority doesn't mean what you'd expect (supporting insight)
6. There's no space to think (supporting insight)
7. Omg is there actually even a role here?
8. We don't know what the fuck to do with AI yet
9. Organisational dysfunction is a feature, not a bug (key insight)
10. The techniques that matter aren't analysis, they're alignment
11. The real craft is conversation
12. Detail is a trap
13. Doers vs shapers (key insight)
14. Community is not a nice-to-have
15. The professional bodies are not delivering
16. BAs are relentless self-improvers (and relentless self-doubters)
17. And yet …  BAs love the work

There's a persuasive fiction of a "proper BA" that almost everyone believes in, and almost nobody is actually doing on the daily.

Only one of the fifteen business analysis professionals I spoke to thought they were doing "proper BA work" — and that person was doing traditional requirements-driven change work in a classic delivery model for a multinational.

Everyone else? They all had strikingly similar ideas of what a "real BA" looks like — more rigorous, more strategic, more detail-oriented, more aligned with what the textbooks and the certs describe — but all of them claimed not to be "that."

Business analysis professionals often feel like they're constantly explaining what they do. That's because they are.

The role is poorly understood at every level — many business analysis professionals themselves didn't know it existed until they fell into it, organisations bring in BAs without a clear idea of what they want from them, and people outside the field have almost no concept of what business analysis involves. This isn't a communication problem that individual BAs can fix by getting better at selling themselves. The role genuinely lacks a clear, shared definition — even within the profession.

Almost nobody set out to become a business analyst.

They were doing adjacent work — project management, comms, operations — and someone pointed them toward BA, or they stumbled across the title and thought it sounded vaguely like what they were already doing. Several didn't even know the role existed until they were already in it.

This matters because it means the profession isn't attracting people deliberately — it's catching them by accident. There's no clear pipeline, no obvious entry point, no moment where someone thinks I want to be a BA the way they might think I want to be a developer or I want to be a designer. The role relies on word of mouth, luck, and supervisors who happen to spot the right aptitude.

Many business analysis professionals — especially the more experienced ones — talked about how the business analyst role has gotten structurally smaller and more boxed into execution work: documentation, requirements, tickets, and admin.

The strategic conversations happen elsewhere, with POs and product managers, and BAs are handed the output. Where the role used to operate holistically and horizontally across the business, involved in strategy, what's happening in practice is steadily narrowing. Several described hitting a ceiling with nowhere to go — no career pathway, no invitation to the table, lower expectations of what the role can contribute. Increasingly specialised and confined.

The business analysis career ladder doesn't represent a change in the kind of work — it just represents more of the same work at bigger scale.

Senior BA means more documentation, bigger scope, more stakeholders but the same fundamental posture: you're handed decisions and asked to execute. The BAs who described doing genuinely different work — shaping direction, seeing across the organisation, influencing strategy — hadn't gotten there by climbing. They'd gotten there by stepping sideways, expanding their own scope, or simply being given responsibility that outstripped their title.

Every BA I spoke to described increasing pressure to deliver — not enough people, not enough time, no breathing space.

This isn't unique to business analysis, but it compounds everything else: relentless delivery pressure reduces the ability to step back, think strategically, or push for something better — making it harder to make the jump to a more strategic role, or to demonstrate value beyond the basics.

The relevance of the business analysis role is no longer clear — even by those who espouse the value.

The overlap with PM and PO roles is visible and growing. The core skills — breaking down problems, facilitating, building shared understanding — are increasingly seen as things everyone should have, not things that warrant a specialist. And the AI discourse, whether accurate or not, is reinforcing the perception that the role is expendable.

The ambiguity of the role and the general misunderstandings about it certainly don't help — it's really bloody hard to defend something that nobody can clearly define.

BAs are using AI. Like, right now, today — as a thinking partner, a first draft, a way in when they don't know who to ask — but nobody's figured out what that means for the role.

The same BA who champions AI for their team gets properly defensive when someone else uses it to do BA-ish work without them. Orgs are promoting AI use while also claiming that 'you're responsible for whatever it spits out' — with zero guidance on where the line is. And the familiar refrain 'they'll still need us for the human stuff' maps right onto the skills that are already undervalued and hard to define.

The upshot? AI isn't clarifying anything. It's just making the ambiguity worse. Fun times.

Every BA described some flavour of organisational mess … 

No pipeline planning, no clear vision, power struggles, frameworks applied in name only, leadership making it up as they go (and then changing their minds). This isn't an obstacle to the work: it is the work. Much of what business analysis professionals do day-to-day is navigate dysfunction that nobody else is dealing with. The messier the organisation, the more critical the BA becomes — if you can cope with the ambiguity, that is.

Most of the BAs I spoke to had stopped (or never really started) using formal analysis techniques — SWOT, PESTLEs, five why's etc … 

They had tried them because that's what a "proper BA" would do but they just didn't generate the value they hoped for, or they seemed designed for a simpler world than the one they were in. The techniques that were used have something in common: they're not really analysis techniques. They're alignment tools. They work because they get people into a room and expose what everyone assumes but nobody has actually confirmed. The value isn't in the structured thinking and step-by-step approach, it is generating a shared view of the situation.

When business analysis professionals talked about what actually works and the stuff that moves things forward nobody described a technique. Instead, they talked about storytelling.

They described building trust, sitting with someone and reflecting back what they need, wrangling alignment across people who see the world differently. Several described it as closer to facilitation than analysis. One BA put it plainly: the job is telling a story — who is this for, what's the problem, can't you see how broken this is?

Formal business analysis techniques are simply hygiene factors. The real craft is in the conversation.

Several business analysis professionals articulated a deliberate trade-off between depth and scope.

They talked about stepping back from prescriptive detail, trusting their teams to own the specifics, and using the space that was created to look upward and across. No one abandoned the detail entirely — everyone agreed they still needed to understand the shape, the risks, and how it all fit together — but they stopped being the person who owned the minutiae.

In return they got scope, influence, and the ability to see patterns across the organisation. This process of "letting go" appears to be a key step on the way to becoming a shaper.

All business analysis professionals started as doers — documenting, writing stories, taking notes, cranking through tasks. But some of the BAs I spoke to have moved past this into something fundamentally different … 

Those that had moved beyond "doing" talked about shaping direction, seeing across the organisation, influencing how work happens rather than just executing it. They might retain the title, but those that have evolved beyond those initial tasks are doing a wildly different — far more ambiguous — role.

These "shapers" — despite working in different countries, different sectors, different organisational cultures — all described remarkably similar work: reading the situation, finding where things are stuck, making progress happen regardless of the mess around them. Role boundaries, hierarchies, and convention be damned.

Almost every business analyst described some form of professional isolation at some point.

Maybe they were the only BA on their team at some point, maybe they lacked access to feedback, maybe they were unsure if they're doing the work right. Peer support is clearly not just a nice to have — it is how business analysis professionals learn, validate, and sustain themselves. Community provides reassurance that someone else is dealing with the same things and patterns for how to approach something new.

This matters even more because the people immediately around you aren't always safe. Several BAs described deeply negative experiences with colleagues that overshadowed everything else about the role.

The business analysis professionals I spoke to had little positive to say about their professional bodies — particularly the IIBA.

The certifications were seen as useful grounding but disconnected from day-to-day reality. The language was overcomplicated, the resources felt like sales pitches, and the ongoing value after certification was hard to articulate. One BA who remains actively involved said that their motivation was about giving back to the profession, not because the IIBA itself was delivering value.

BAs are clearly hungry for community and support — and the one organisation that's supposed to provide that is failing to deliver.

The same instinct that makes business analysis professionals good at their work — pulling things apart, questioning assumptions, spotting the 10% that isn't right — can easily turn inward.

Almost every BA I spoke to displayed a pronounced tendency toward self-analysis, and many demonstrated characteristics of low confidence, second-guessing, and a reluctance to claim expertise.

But the navel-gazing has an upside. BAs tended to be proactive with their own development — turning the analytical lens on their own gaps, identifying what they needed, and going after it. The same mindset that makes them second-guess their value also makes them relentless self-improvers.

Business analysis professionals genuinely enjoy this work. They talked about the high of a team clicking, the satisfaction of mentoring juniors, the pleasure of making something abstract clear.

And when they described what specifically keeps them going, it was always about human impact — saving someone hours of pointless work, making a person feel safe, watching the lightbulb go on. Not the title, not the techniques, not the career path. No one was particularly precious about what their role was called — they're chasing the work and the feeling it gives them instead.

When you step back, an overarching narrative appears.

I started this project because I had lost the thread of "why" I was doing, well, any of this! I ended this work feeling slightly less alone in feeling like the work I do is more nuanced and complex than the common narratives out there about our profession.

That in and of itself is valuable to me and makes the effort worth it. In practice I'm still working through what this means for me.

My main takeaway is that maverick "do-the-right-thing" energy is way more common than we think. Perhaps we are our own worst enemy? Are we victims of the system? Or are we perfectly placed to challenge it? Hmmmmmm. Either way, I'm reassured that there is work here. It might not be the work we expected, but it is work that is needed, and work that is valuable.

As one participant put it, until AI can understand all the insane things we humans do, we'll probably be okay.

Until AI can work out how to understand Susan's horrors of accounting — that she's been running in her dodgy spreadsheets for 20 years — we'll probably be okay.

It has certainly given me some interesting threads to follow and I hope it does the same for you.